On September 13, 2022, 12 amazing women spoke about web development, JavaScript, tech culture, and career development at the one-day virtual event Front-End Foxes Day. And I was one of them.
I would like to give you an insight into the whole process, from a woman who was about to give her very first talk ever, and in a foreign language.
CFP - Call For Proposals
On July 11th Front-End Foxes did call for proposals. It was always my dream to speak at a conference one day, and I wanted to do everything I could to achieve that goal someday. That special moment seemed to be right now.
Encouraged by the great team behind it all, I submitted my proposal and waited for the deadline to pass. Soon after, on July 18th, I got the answer. My presentation was accepted.
Not only that, I even got to give a live full-length (30-minute) talk, with a short Q&A session afterwards. I was speechless. I was overwhelmed, happy and.... holy sh*, I should give a talk? Me?
Preparation
I enjoy speaking about accessibility and how to get into tech as a career changer. For this event, I applied to speak on "A11y: Myths and Misconceptions."
Since I had already written a blog post on this topic, I thought it would be easy to prepare. But that wasn't the case. My article was way too short to talk about the topic for 30 minutes. I was getting a little nervous.
I did a lot of research on myths and misconceptions and luckily found some information and convincing opposing arguments that were much more embellished than in my blog post. Slowly but surely I got into it quite well and in the end even had to cut out some parts to stay under 30 minutes.
Funny how the situation then turned in the completely other direction. I definitely didn't have that problem of having too much info with my master thesis.
It took me almost up to a week before the event to finally finish my talk and prepare the presentation, which I created using Canva. There are quite a few templates there and I'm pretty satisfied with how my presentation looked.
Front-End Foxes Day
Before the big day I was invited to a setup check meeting with the operator Brian Rinaldi, of cfe.dev. On cfe.dev you can watch talks on many different topics for free. So check it out.
What a great human being Brian is. Friendly and considerate, because this is all completely new to me, we clarified how I would get into the stream, share my presentation, and when I would start my talk.
The process was very clear through this preparation meeting, so I was hardly nervous that something might not work out. But of course, I was pretty nervous about giving my talk.
Luckily, due to a click error at the beginning of my presentation, I was only able to see my own screen and not the stream, so I was able to relax and give the talk as I had practiced. And I practiced a lot.
Conference Stream
And here it is. You can watch the entire conference on these two streams, separated into morning and afternoon stream.
See the full schedule of talks given that day.
My talk starts at 02:23:30 and was the last talk in the morning stream. But I embed my individual session recording below. I sincerely hope you enjoyed my talk and the conference as a whole. I was truly grateful for the opportunity to give my first talk on a topic that is close to my heart.
If you didn't catch everything I mentioned on my slides, don't worry. Here are the slides of my presentation.
What is Front-End Foxes?
In case you didn't know, Front-End Foxes is a new kind of bootcamp - for women, by women, to promote front-end development skills for career changers. The initiative was founded by the great Head of Academic Advocacy at AWS @jenlooper. The next cohort will begin on September 19. Don't miss out on the opportunity to be part of something amazing.
Thanks for your reading and time. I really appreciate it!
Top comments (5)
This post just made my day! Thank you for writing up your experiences and for the compliments.
This did not feel like your first talk ever. Seriously, you did really great and clearly have a talent for presenting. I look forward to seeing more presentations from you!
Thank you so much Brian.
I didn't know about this! Luckily we can still watch the recording. Thanks for sharing, will definitely check it out.
Just finished watching your talk and loved it!
Thank you Isabel! That means a lot!